I have less than a month left in Spain. It's so weird to think that. So after almost three months here what have I even learned? Well one thing that I know I talk about a lot in my blog posts that I have learned about is the immense complexity of language. There is so much more to learning a language than just conjugating the verbs correctly, having gender/number agreement, and correct sentence order. Languages have a soul. They have an attitude. They have feeling and strength. They have ways of handling situations delicately and harshly. It is something that we do not learn in the classroom. This is by no means the fault of our professors or our curriculum, but rather something that you have to experience rather than learn. There are things that cannot be taught because they can only be learned. Does that make sense? Here is my best example:
Consoling someone
Someone just told you that their family member has passed away. How do you respond? Your grandmother mentions that two Spanish citizens were seriously injured in the London attacks. What do you say? When you're only armed with simple vocabulary such as "I'm sorry" or "that's horrible", you begin to feel that your knowledge is vastly inadequate. If you can't communicate with someone at a serious time like this, when they need words of support, you feel like you know nothing.
I had an experience with one of my professors telling our class about about how her sister was in the Atocha train station in Madrid when it was bombed in 2004. As she recounted seeing her sister running out of the burning building on the news, we could all hear her beginning to choke up. But we had no words. None.
It was at this moment, I was reminded that some things surpass languages. Everyone in the room leaned in and gave her our best concerned and comforting look. Since we had no words, we were forced to speak with our eyes. With our faces. With our hands.
And she understood. And she continued on with her story.
Language is about people and not about rules (but yes if you follow the rules people will probably understand you better). When learning a foreign language it's about giving every interaction your best effort and remembering that the other person you're talking to is also human and they can feel the same emotions that you do.
Speaking of what you didn't learn in school, here's a photo of my university. I have a class in the second door on the left of the ground floor.